OEM+ or bust!reelizmpro: I will always be an e30 guy.. I still do all of my own laborTrentW: There's just something so right about a well-built M20 in an E30e30m3s54turbo: I save my money for tuner parts.

I noticed the M508 earthwormjim modified has the display reversed polarized from the original. Curious if either you or kid8 could tell/show if it has a blueish tint when turned off now.

Yes, there is a very slight blueish/purplish tint, it's hard to capture with a camera, it never matches what the appearance with your eye looks like. The tint isn't from an actual pigment or color of the filter, it's just from the way ambient reflected light is bent, so cameras don't see it correctly. One shot it will look pink, the next it will not be visible, the next it will be slightly blue.

Wow, expensive, I need to build retro stuff with fewer features than current items and sell them for a ton more lol!

Realities of low volume production. Tooling alone is tens of thousands of dollars for something like the face plate.

Just look at how expensive the bluetooth board jay built is. It's the price of a radio, but I bet he's not making much of a profit. Unless you're building 10,000+ of something, manufacturing and parts acquisition are extremely expensive. I'm not knocking his product by the way, it's a great product for a niche market. That was the direction I really wanted to go, but I got tired of chasing down clean OEM radios that didn't need a ton of work to refurbish.